The Signifying Eye: Seeing Faulkner’s Art by Candace Waid (review)

Candace Waid’s extensive study of Faulkner’s work challenges its readers in several ways. First, even those of us who have long labored to understand Faulkner’s opus are pleasantly surprised by Waid’s analysis of Faulkner’s graphic art. Her analysis of the young Faulkner’s Beardsley-inspired illustrations for the one-act play The Marionettes is not only fascinating in itself but also reveals themes (the “headless woman and headless work of art,” for example) that will permeate Faulkner’s entire body of work. Waid employs the visual art to reveal sometimes concealed motifs that will play out across Faulkner’s development as a writer. In this regard, one must applaud the University of Georgia Press for being willing to leave the backs of two illustrated pages blank so that Waid could make a point about an illustration that reveals the dream of an endless embrace—but only when two of Faulkner’s drawings are superimposed as they would be in a closed book. The blank pages allow Waid’s readers literally to see the point she is making. As Waid puts it, “When the slender volume of The Marionettes is closed in each of the extant versions, the Pierrot of his own dream is always embracing Marietta … as long as the book remains unopened, [it] inscribes the hidden fact of an embrace, the consummated dream, with page lying forever on intimate page” (12). This is an ingenious analysis of the visual material, but in Waid’s hands, it serves as a “strange but ultimately recognizable psychic iconography, a visual vocabulary that sharpens the experimental edge to much of his fiction” (17). Waid traces both Faulkner’s visual arts inheritance on the distaff side and his verbal legacy from his great-grandfather. And all of this material brings a fresh perspective to the many approaches that have been employed over the decades to investigate Faulkner’s work.

But Waid’s volume is not simply an analysis of Faulkner’s visual art, it is a full-fledged rethinking of Faulkner’s work that grows out of the initial analysis of themes submerged in the visual. The “signifying eye” is thus both Faulkner’s and Waid’s. Among the interpretative moves that Waid makes is the redefining of southern literature as a reverse slave narrative that moves the main character back into a past permeated by racial and racially mediated sexual consciousness and into a kind of southern interiority as well as a distinctly southern orality. In this effort, Waid goes well beyond the boundaries of Faulkner’s own work to examine texts by a variety of writers from the American South from several different generations. The breadth of knowledge exhibited in this exploration is truly impressive.

If Waid takes up the issue of race as one of her parameters, she takes up gender as another. She explores the relationship between Faulkner and two powerful female writers—Willa Cather and Edith Wharton. The centrality of women—and of the bodies of mothers in particular—among Faulkner’s characters ties for Waid back to the influence of these two powerful writers. She sees As I Lay Dying as a work that helps transform the family romance in American Literature. Depicting the mother as both central to the family and a destroyer of sons, Faulkner’s novel plays out the relationship between mothers and sons as well as between black and white male and female characters. Waid’s analysis is heavily psychological, sometimes taxingly so. The “Signifying eye” is also, of course, the “Signifying I.” But her overall interpretations are compelling. Whether she is investigating abstract shapes or intricate language, Waid has a creative sense of Faulkner’s work.

Turning back from the literary to the visual in a broader historical context, Waid includes Whistler’s influence on Faulkner. She also investigates Willem de Kooning’s Faulkner Trilogy, Light in August, Black Friday, and Black Untitled. She traces de...